The Calliope living with me is three and a half, and I gather that the one living with Dr. Girlfriend is a kitten. So not the same cat . . .
unless, wait. Could she have not only powers of bilocation, but also powers of rejuvenation?
With cats, almost anything is possible!
I have my kitty Skittles, so I honestly don’t feel hugely alone. I was always a bit of a homebody, though I do miss my occasional outings to the theater or restaurant. My birthday is the 14th and I’ll be eating with my parents at their house (ordering in whatever sounds good to me, lol). I do still go on solo walks when it’ nice out. Apart from working at home, my routine hasn’t really changed all THAT much? I do feel a little stir-crazy not being able to go out every couple weeks, though.
I made a post a bit ago about going through alopecia. Well, a recent blood test came to the conclusion that my protactin is really pretty high. While not likely, since I’m not exhibiting most other symptoms, this could mean a tumor or other mass on my pituitary glance, so my doctor is scheduling an MRI.
Guys, in general, I’m a naturally very healthy person. I’ve never had so much as a broken bone or even the flu. Blood draws are the worst medical experience I typically have, though, and I’ve developed a fear of them since I had a particularly traumatizing draw as a 6 year old. Suffice to say, the idea of lying there for 45 minutes with a needle in my vein is TERRIFYING the shit out of me. The tight space and noise I can handle, but a needle sitting there in my arm is another story. My appointment is about 3 weeks away, depending on COVID-19 and other scheduling issues, and I’m already breaking into a nervous sweat just thinking about it. Mind you, I don’t even know for sure if I’ll need the contrast dye. But I hear it’s common for scanning the pituitary gland, so I’m bracing for the worst. After all of this, assuming there’s no issue such as a tumor (again, not anticipating that), my doctor can start me on something to help lower my prolactin level and maybe, finally, that’ll help with the alopecia. I’m hoping so hard it will.
Also, if the MRI really really sucks, maybe blood draws will seem super tame in comparison, and freak me out less in the future. I can dream!..
Ok guys, I started a thread over in MPSIMS with a kitten pic. Didn’t want to hijack this thread.
https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=893859
Sending good thoughts to everyone going through sucky stuff right now.
Kovitlac, talk to your doctor. Some people get sedation for MRI’s, even without needle issues. I didn’t need sedation; but if I’d reported claustrophobia I’m sure I could have gotten it; they told me it’s standardly required for MRI’s to have someone else available to drive the patient home in case sedation’s needed. I would think you could get it for phobia about injections.
Have the discussion in advance; I got the impression that they wanted you to get your primary care physician to order the sedative before you came in, though I don’t know what they would have done if I’d freaked out in the equipment and had to be pulled out (they gave me a panic button.)
Unless I’m misunderstanding you… you won’t have a needle in your arm during the whole MRI. They’ll probably give you a shot of the contrast substance. I’ve had two MRIs and while I wouldn’t want one every day of the week they’re only about 1% as distressing as the average root canal. (UGH! People working inside your mouth for [del]hours[/del] many long minutes… ewww!) There is no pain involved whatsoever, just a loud, clanging sound.
When I had the second one, I asked the technician to let me know when we were halfway done. That helped. Lie still and keep your eyes shut or wear an eye mask. I was very anxious before my first one, but it turned out to be a classic case of the worry being a million times worse than the actual event. Look at it this way: it’s 45 (or less) minutes out of your life, and millions of people have gone through them. If they can do it, you can do it.
Don’t think about it so much ahead of time, and certainly don’t brace yourself for the worst. (Unless you’ve found that that particular strategy works to calm you-- it wouldn’t work for me.) You might think of some very nice place you’d like to go for dinner after it’s over and focus on that. The appointment will be here and over with before you know it!
I’ve been reading the many interesting replies here and want to thank ThelmaLou for starting this thread.
Maybe my question is a foolish one, and if so, I apologize, but I’d still like to know how others plan to care for themselves of they do catch the virus.
Obviously someone who gets only a very mild case would be able to do self-care without any issues. But there are a lot of people–I know one in particular–who have been quite ill and too weak to care for themselves but not sick enough to be admitted to the hospital. The person I know lives with her family.
This is my biggest concern about COVID.
Thanks, nelliebly. 
This is my biggest concern about ANY serious health problems I might have. I don’t have a plan and frankly don’t know what I would do.
A friend drove me to the hospital when I had a lumpectomy. (He is now deceased.) I drove myself to all my radiation appointments and all other doc followups. My neighbor took me both times when I had cataract surgery. Those are my major medical events. I’ve never needed “care,” and a damned good thing, too.
Hate to say this, but unless I’m remembering entirely wrong, I did have a needle in my arm the whole time. (I wasn’t bothered by this.) They set it up before I got into the machine, and told me they were going to be adding the contrast partway through and I might feel cold in the arm when they did it (which I did, briefly.) [ETA: nobody was in the room with me when they put the contrast into the line; it was done from outside.]
I don’t know whether they always do it that way.
Yikes! :eek:
I know I got an injection of the contrast stuff, but not a continuous i.v. That is definitely freaky. Maybe it depends on what part of the body they’re aiming at.
It looks as if MRI for pituitary tumours does use contract media. Gadolinium. So, from a wide point of view it sounds a little scary. However, in knowledge there is power, and of course, in reality, there is nothing to be worried about, it is just a rather freaky experience.
I would hope they explain in detail what will be happening. Years ago I needed an abdominal CT with contrast medium. What sticks in my mind was the warning that most people react in a very peculiar way when the contrast medium was injected for that procedure. There is a feeling that they have just shat themselves. So I was warned explicitly to expect this, and to keep it in mind. No, really, when it happens, I have not disgraced myself. It was uncanny. It wasn’t super strong, but the sensation was exactly as described.
MRI’s are a bit different to X-ray CT, but overall there is more in common than differences. Perhaps the most important thing about an MRI is that the damned machines are noisy. They are unavoidably basically a large loudspeaker - make up of a huge magnet plus electrically energised magnetic coils. When the machine is scanning, the coils bang and thump in a most disconcerting manner. For head scans they like to wrap a close fitting antenna around your head so that they get the best possible signal.
Knowing ahead of time what will happen, and importantly why, is often a great start to ameliorating any anxiety. There is always the underlying anxiety about the reason why you are having the procedure in the first place and where to from here. But the actual scan, whilst a bit impersonal, full of weird tech, and not something you would be choosing to do for the fun of it, can be something of an adventure if one puts one mind into that frame.
Best of luck anyway.
I’ve been both stupidly pessimistic and stupidly optimistic about Covid-19. I am sure I’m going to get it (although I’m not going out of my way to do so), but I don’t think I’ll get very sick from it. Absolutely no realistic justification for either belief. I just don’t seem to care, which is really odd for someone who is usually a big worrier. I’m more worried about passing it one to somebody else.
Back in 2012 I got deathly sick, so much so that my joke “I do pretty good for a dead guy” isn’t the cool brag it seems. After two weeks of flopping around the hose, I ended up in hospital for three weeks. During that time, my father came by the house twice a day and looked after my furbabies. And cleaned up some (the bugger). When I got out of hospital, I stayed at the Olde Folkes home for a few weeks while Dad kept my babies healthy and the house going. All went really well. The dogs were almost his by the time I got back home.
But that was eight years ago. Nowadays my Mom can’t walk anymore so Dad and homecare are taking care of her. It’s a fulltime job. They are both in their 80s. My sister has her own family to take care of. So unless things got really bad, I’d say I was on my own. Wish me luck.
“Stay the blazes home” - Stephen McNeil, Premier of Nova Scotia
That’s a potential problem, yeah.
Early this winter, when I thought I might need surgery (they decided I only need meds, yay!), I had friends lined up in advance who were able, during the expected periods of time, to drive me around, to stay in the house or come up from next door and take care of the cats, to take care of me for a while after I got back home. But I would only have been asking them for their time. I wasn’t asking them to risk their lives, and those of their household members, by being in contact with someone ill with an infectious disease. I’d feel a lot less happy about asking them now.
Mine was cardiac, FWIW. I don’t know whether they do it that way for all cardiac MRI’s, though; or whether all facilities do it the same way.
They gave me ear plugs; but the noise wasn’t as bad as I expected. For some reason I’d been expecting some sort of really loud continuous noise. Instead it was more like BZZZZZ BZZZZZ BZZZZZ BZZZZ CLANG CLANG silence for a while DING DING DING silence CLANGITY CLANGITY BZZZZZ BZZZZZ silence till I started to wonder what was going on before it started up again or a voice came in, and so on. I took to counting the BZZZZZ’s for something to do; there seemed to usually be about twelve to fifteen of them, IIRC, in a given batch. Fewer of the clangs and dings.
Again that might vary depending on what’s being scanned; but I suspect that in general it’s not CONTINUOUS ROAR the whole time.
Luckily none of the noises hit any of the particular frequencies that really bother me; so, for me at least, no teeth-on-edge factor. Just loud.
I think the most difficult thing for me, besides a little bit of claustrophobic feeling but not too bad, was worrying whether I was holding still enough. They told me that I could slightly move/stretch my arms and legs, but if I moved my torso it might ruin the whole series. Apparently I managed it all right, though.
The noise is directly related to how the machine creates it images. Hard to explain without some passably serious (undergraduate level) mathematics and physics. But if you think of each individual bang, whether it be a big bang, or one of the little bangs that make up a buzzzzzz, they are the coils creating slightly different gradients of magnetic field through your body, each band is a coil changing its gradient slightly. Each different gradient causes the protons in the water inside you to sing at a slightly different frequency in response to a pulse from a radio frequency generator, and by knowing what the gradient was, the computer can work out where the various parts of you that were singing away are, and thus build up a map of what is inside you. The contrast medium subtlety alters the frequency to magnetic field relationship, and so allows the system to outline parts of your body that take up the medium differently.
But basically, the bang buzz and thump is quite literally the scanner twisting the magnetic field around to allow the radio frequency detection system to scan through you.
The very early research MRI scanners actually used high end HiFi amplifiers to drive the gradient coils. (The venerable Crown DC300)
Yeah, it sucks.
My wife called yesterday morning just to chat - and that is VERY odd for her. She doesn’t like talking on the phone with anyone; to call just to chat about random things for 25 minutes is astoundingly out of character, so much so that fir the first two minutes of the call I was waiting for her to give me some kind of horrible news. It took that long for me to believe what was happening. I loved talking to her, it was a fun call, but I cannot think of something more indicative of how lonely people are getting.
I am WFH, with a wife and two small children as cell-mates.
I would love to be living on my own, furloughed with nothing to do except smoking cigarettes and watching Captain Kangaroo.
I’m talking video games, wine for breakfast, being in nothing but my underwear 24/7, losing all perspective of night and day, no responsibilities, no noise. … It sounds like bliss…
Years ago, when my mother was going into dementia and first living here and then the cause of multiple phone calls and visits (both her and out-of-town family) while she was in a nursing home, I came up with a fantasy world; which I won’t otherwise go into here except to say that it involved my having a hundred acres of farm and woods and lakefront, two cats and a dog, a house and barns and pretty much anything advertised in the last hundred years that I wanted to order – but, for six months, no human contact and I couldn’t go anywhere else.
This situation has unnerving similarities to that fantasy. Though in the fantasy, among the things I no longer needed to worry about were the results of elections, or filling out my taxes.
For you, maybe. But damn sure not for me. For me it’s profoundly boring, depressing, and lonely, and the worst thing is that if you even speculate on when it might end, you’re a lout who wants to throw Granny under the train for the sake of your stock portfolio.
I hear you - my fantasy is very different to your reality
[virtual fist-bump]
I don’t mean to be a braggart, but for me it is. No dealing with people I don’t necessarily want to deal with, no schedule at all, time has no meaning (except that all Timmies here but one close at 5 pm)… but that’s just me. It is addictive, for sure, but it can also make you into a lost cause if you’re not careful.
I do sometimes envy people who have it in them to live a normal life. This weekend, for instance, when we would normally have a family get-together, I will be here alone with my dogs and leftover pizza. I miss my parents, but am afraid to go see them.
No smokes here, gave them up years ago, but I can live on Tim’s land anything with sugar in it.
“Stay the blazes home” - Stephen McNeil, Premier of Nova Scotia
I live alone – no pets. I can work from home but did not do so until I had to. I prefer the office (separating work form home), but I’m reasonably productive (only one monitor at home)
I am a creature of habit so shower and dress like I’m going to work. Except I don’t wear shoes.
I often take a walk in the morning and at lunch (just around the block) – this helps.
I email friends and family and with text with coworkers. I am used to being alone so am doing mostly OK mood wise.
Brian